Today on Midmorning Hampton argued that, when looking for a book to adapt for the screen, great writing is one thing you don’t want.

Sometimes you have to be careful of a book that’s really well written, because that’s the one quality that won’t show in a movie. If the prose is beautiful, that’s a novelistic thing, not a dramatic thing, so you look for… the novels that work when they’re translated to theater or to film are novels with a dramatic line. And often a beautifully written book or even a powerful book that will haunt you for years will not work as a movie.